Mobile devices are increasingly becoming the entry point for a disparate range of communication services. This has particularly become the situation since the Internet became a further mechanism for channelling communication services. That is, in addition to the POTS infrastructure and the mobile communication network infrastructure, the Internet has become an additional configuration that supports communications products and services. In this regard examples of communication products supported by the Internet include “blogs”, RSS feeds, widgets, websites and particularly social networking sites. Communication services that can be directly served over the Internet include voice calls, SMS, MMS, video calls, email and IP communications in general.
Therefore, with mobile devices now serving as both communication devices on traditional networks and as entry points for Internet communications products and services, users are faced with a proliferation in the number of communication channels. Indeed it is plausible that as the number of channels of communication increase, the number of contacts and traffic will also increase as a person's communication network expands. This is because, the increase in communication channels exposes users to a greater number of other users (including individual persons and entities such as companies and groups of people) which accordingly results in a corresponding quantitative increase in the number of actual communications. Indeed, many of the Internet-based community communications services are valued because they increase the number of contacts a user has.
However, while opening up available communication channels has facilitated the widening of social circles and fostering of communities, such an open networks, it unfortunately has also resulted in users falling prey to unsolicited communications, whether of a pernicious or just annoying in nature.
This quantitative increase in communications from a wider range of other users is often intrusive and compromises users' control of who contacts them and when. In particular, a common area of irritation often relates to notifications including changes in status of communications, events or even website updates, rather than the communications themselves. In this regard, where a user subscribes to a particular service, such as a social networking site, the service is likely to send notifications of any changes. As well as notifying changes of status, notifications are also received by the user, such as when one of their contacts posts them a message, or invites them to an event, or a topical page they are a member of is updated.
In this regard, notifications distract the user, since they require the user to view them before going into the background or require the user to respond by replying. For example, emails are often received as notifications first in the user's line of sight or on a homepage, and the user has to act on these notifications to dismiss them either by reading them, deleting or performing some other action. More specifically, social networking sites send notifications of changes through a communication channel such as email and/or SMS and again this requires the user to act or at minimum to be distracted even though the communication may be unsolicited and from an unwanted source.
Managing this increase in communication across various channels is not a trivial task or one that will go away. Furthermore, as these channels are most often technically different with separate user interfaces, the user is generally required to move between the different communications channels to view them and monitor communications e.g. email, SMS and/or MMS. This may also require the user to use different devices or navigate between distinctly different parts, such as where proprietary client software is required to operate the communication channel on a device. For instance, a user may be able to manage their Jaiku™ account on PC and their mobile terminal, due to having the Jaiku™ client application installed on their mobile terminal, but only be able to manage their Facebook™ page on PC due to their mobile not having a compatible client application. Similarly, they may only be able to view emails from different service providers on their PC and SMS/MMSs on their mobile phone. Therefore, managing the notifications is thus a real need both now and in the future.
Social Network Aggregators have been proposed, such as Profilefly (www.profilefly.com) and Power.com, which combine information and communications from different social networking sites into a single URL address. These aggregators serve to concentrate communications in the one location, but do not address the problem of an increase in communication traffic, particularly notifications, that are generated from such social networking sites. Unfortunately, the viral nature of communications means that aggregation in itself only ensures a single point of entry for all communications without providing management or control. However, while aggregating social networks makes it easier for the user to receive notifications and content but does not address the problem that these networks have the potential to increase traffic beyond what the user has expected and also is able to manage.
Furthermore, mobile communication devices, by their nature, are particularly predisposed to receiving a multitude of communications/notifications from various sources, so there is a need to manage these communications/notifications on user interfaces (UIs) of such mobile communication devices. In particular there is a need to manage both communications that the mobile devices receive from its standard communication networks, as well as from the Internet.
The present invention therefore seeks to overcome and/or ameliorate at least one of the problems of the prior art.